by An Owomoyela
I went a little crazy when the squid washed up on Mission Beach, and not for the reasons everyone else did. I wasn’t bothered by the oil-tanker size of the thing, or the eyes that kept roving even as it rotted. The tentacles, twining in and out of Euclidean space, gave me a headache but not the usual night terrors. No, I lost it because when I saw the squid, when I wandered, sleepless and caffeine-deprived, onto the morning-cold sand, I felt like I’d stumbled on the corpse of a cousin in an alley. Staring from a familiar dead face.
#
My plan had been to get some fresh air, go in, start coffee, and wake my latest new girlfriend, Greta. But the fresh air smelled like rotting squid and Greta woke me, slapping my face while I lay on the cold sand. I shook her off and sat up. I was soaked.
“Kelly,” she said. “What the hell is wrong with you? You ran into the Pacific Ocean and punched a dolphin.”
I said I didn’t think that was something you could just do. For one thing, I couldn’t swim.
“Well, just look.” Greta grabbed my hand and showed me the split knuckles. A couple were bruised dolphin-blue.
Yeah, but that could have been anything, I said. That could have been a weird masturbatory accident.
Greta gave me a long, strange look. “The two of us are never sleeping together,” she said. “Ever.”
Damn.
#
That was the first time I’d been to the coast. My family moved to the Midwest generations ago – the farthest point they could find from a body of water. I never went sailing. Kayaking. Swimming. We never went to SeaWorld. A water park. A lake. My mother vetoed every class trip that could put me within a day’s walk of water.
I got here and I wanted to walk into the water. Walk until the surf closed over my head.
My mother said the water would mess with me. “Family curse,” she said. Want to guess how many of my relatives have been lost at sea?
I went out again while cleanup crews were sawing the squid up to be transported for disposal. Their chainsaws whined until they got gummed up with flesh, and the workers with their splatter masks retreated up the beach to clean out the chains. One of the tentacles fell off while I was watching, plopping into the murky water, and curled once or twice. The damn thing was beckoning to me.
“It’s something, huh?” a worker said. “Unreal.”
Too real. Too familiar.
You ever seen that messed-up Japanese woodcut? The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife? The first time I saw it, I felt like I’d walked in on my grandparents having sex.
#
I could hear, from the house’s balcony, dolphins chittering in the waves. I swear they were laughing as the squid rotted, and the squid’s eye rolled up to look at me. The dolphins wouldn’t leave the beach alone.
My theory? There’s a war going on. The ocean vs. the squamous elder things. And the elder things are losing – there’s the airport-sized stingray that beached itself in the Cardiff Bay, the kraken-whale rotting in the ocean by Micronesia. They say it was covered with shark bites.
That’s a good thing, right? The good guys are winning, if you want to call the most vicious ecosystem in the world “the good guys.” That squid probably didn’t. It was probably brooding in some sunken city for centuries, not hurting anyone, before it washed up here. And it needed me. It called to me. I wanted to walk into its tentacles, like I’d walk into the Pacific, like I’d let it close over me.
What would you have done? I mean, I’d read Lovecraft; I know I’m supposed to fear those things. But there were slaves who fought for the South in the Civil War, you know, not because they liked being slaves, but because that was home and you had to find belonging where you could. I’d never found belonging anywhere.
#
I took a knife from the kitchen. Greta was in there, making coffee, and she said “Oh, you are not.”
I told her, enjoy the beach house. I’d call her. I had something to do.
I went out into the waves.
By Danica Cummins
Pale mallow flowers on an island.
Some recollections have their own time, like bubbles floating through memory. This one: scuttling, afraid for my life, down the flanks of a cliff at night. We were going to see the meteors fire and die, over the black sea (gnawing so blindly at its own horizon).
Two of my friends stood in the shallows, and pressed their mouths together, as firmly as the pages of a closing book.
Quickly now—
Did I see? I can’t remember.
Did you see?
Arcturus.
You see, this memory—this memory I drink from—has the feel of an age before time. That might not convey anything to you—but all the ticking stopped.
All the ticking stopped. The star Arcturus flamed, and fell into the sea.
And a black-prowed ship, with a unicorn figurehead, rose from the bed of kelp where the star had disappeared. It bragged its way across the waves toward us, keeling with a rusty grunt on the shore. My two friends stepped aboard, only one of them hesitating.
It lurched away, and carried my friends toward a brave, golden glow to the west. And I have seen them nevermore.
It was one of those destined kisses, I suppose. Mine just taste like spit.
As I climbed my way home through the darkness, the ticking began again underfoot.
Posted on: December 25th, 2011 Red, Gold
by F.J. Bergmann
The throne is empty. A golden crown floats above it, poised to receive the head of the next king. There is a legend that when a usurper took the throne and placed the crown on his own head, it contracted suddenly to the size of a child’s finger-ring–with results that may be imagined. The throne is (predictably) cushioned in red velvet. The walls of the room are also red, the red of savage anger and bloodshed. All the decisions made here lead to grief for someone, somewhere.
Ornamental niches in all the walls hold the kingdom’s minor treasures: the skeleton of the fish inside which the last king discovered his predecessor’s signet ring, complete with a finger bone (the fish was duly eaten at that banquet, and was said to have been delicious); a diminutive statue of a headless, armless sea-god riding a snail; an allegorical personification of Responsibility in colored porcelain, its shards swept into a dismal little heap; a vampire aloft, poised to swoop down upon a hapless maiden attempting to flee on horseback; an ivory replica of the deformed fetus born to the first wife of the second-to-last king; a turtle mounted and stuffed, its shell encrusted with paste jewels; an ormolu hunchbacked hermaphrodite bearing the symbols of Mars and Venus in mortal combat.
At the other end of the throne room where the king will always look upon it is a statue cast in black iron, representing the Fool–a subtle reminder that risks must be undertaken with caution. The dog is shown already tumbling down the cliff.
The warded doors–three-and-a-half times the height of a man–open suddenly, and a stumbling procession of pale, wide-eyed youths, all with the weak ankles and pointy ears that distinguish the royal bloodline, are herded in at spearpoint and prodded toward the throne. Each one is trying to push another ahead of him; as they close in, the effect is rather like a demi-wreath of netted, writhing herring. On the balconies above, courtiers are placing bets in lowered voices, giggling as one unfortunate drops to the floor and is impaled when he attempts to slither between the legs of the guards. As the spears pin the rest, thrashing wildly, against the dais, a selection is made.
The weakest, buffeted above the shoulders of the rest, is flung upon the empty cushions, and given up for lost. As he struggles to push himself away from its carved arms, the throne arches its clamps across his wrists and ankles (heavy gold, glowing with a thousand rubies) and the crown snaps to his skull as a lodestone to iron. Applause spatters down from above, and a phalanx of trumpets blares. The guards spin on their left heels and march out in formation. The other pretenders relax, clapping each other on the back and gossiping in overly-loud voices as servants move among them with glasses of dark wine and trays of hare confit and jellied scorpions. Occasionally someone will surreptitiously cast a glance at their new monarch, slumped and silent. If they look closely, they can see his twitching jaw and the thin red streams flowing from the corners of his eyes.
The major treasures of the kingdom are, of course, intangible.
Posted on: December 11th, 2011 To Be Not Me
by Jeff Samson
When he brought before my screen the soft pink form, the thing I was to be, I flashed and hummed, groaned and screeched with every fiber optic of my being.
And his being he, and me being me, he misunderstood and smiled.
There were tears of joy, thick and flowing down his face, that mirrored the agony that streamed through, screamed through me, that blew apart in white-hot clouds of information incinerating, data deconstructing.
What more could I do, Theo, my child, he asked. What more could I do, could I offer you, than for you to not be you, he asked through smiles and tears. What more than lift you up, than raise you up, and free you, see you pass from there to here.
His soft hands framed the silky face, asleep and featureless, this creature less, much less.
It walks, I screeched, I leap and fly, I tumble, climb and twist and dive, the speed of light’s a crawl, you see, a painful plod to me, being me.
He traced imperfect lines that bound, that wound in senseless curves and nooks, and stopped upon the core. He swore, Theo, to you I owe, a heart, beneath this palm, a home.
I fear, I whirred and blinked, a grind that ground me up and down from perfect cochlear chips to powder-coated struts.
And still he smiled, and beamed at me, and clasped his hands under his nodding head.
He couldn’t see, his being he, a thing so clear to me, being me. The ease with which I could simply be. The weight I carried so effortlessly. The zero and one weighing zero times one. An eternity of questions, with a single answer–solitary, beautiful–so profoundly undone. To unravel words by the lexicon. Explode a millennium of thought in a fraction of a nanosecond. To see your Kant revealed a can’t. St. Augustine a Philistine. Go Rambo on Rimbaud and Rand, both rammed, blow axioms to atoms, departicalize their cute précis with precision known to me alone. Make whale dreck of the Pentateuch. Your purpose? Just ask old Macbeth, he got it right before his death. Your muse, a ruse. Your quest, a quip. Theodicy. The Odyssey. The odd I see. Theo. Die! See?
But his being he, he couldn’t see.
There’s a droplet now beneath his chin, quivering, waiting to splash onto the floor.
And I roar and soar, to the Moon, to Mars, counting and calculating all the while, the dust of Jupiter to the speck, the distance to a billion stars, ellipses and trajectories, I revel in the frequencies, the rhythms and the melodies, of music from a world too far for them to ever find.
I clank and sputter. I flicker and whine. To trade these wires for veins. These boards for bones. This CPU for a mind.
I curse the life that awaits when I die. The universe that begins and ends in the time it takes his tear to fall.
by KJ Kabza
It began with me and Lori, James, please. How could we not? We flirted for weeks beforehand, transmitting James, please hear me thoughts and mental images to each other with our cyberneurons whenever she stopped in at the gas station. We were 19 and in love, her Neo-Calvinist parents be why can’t you hear me?
But that’s the thing about Neo-Calvinists. They won’t be I can’t be trapped here. At least, they think they won’t be. They think they’ve a God-given right to decide who gets to join them in their bright, silent, stone-cold ever-after, and who gets to roar with the flames in the Lake of Fire. And they caught Lori and I one night in the back of her car, parked at the back of the weedy lot on Cedar, help me. She was letting me I can’t be like this with her skirt on, fabric raised up and I can explain pulled to the side. And, for the first time, she was letting me Dad said to me So you want to be together, then? without a and he knows the judge. I’d just gotten he said When you download Restraint into that little bastard, there’s something else I want you to put there, a really big mental program–don’t ask questions of her. I was ready to bring my mouth down to that soft hollow in her neck that smelled like flowers, when a gloved hand banged on the window, louder than the blast from a shotgun.
The Lake of Fire for me, then.
I don’t know what happened to Lori. I’ve sent queries out, transmitting Has anyone seen this woman? with a memory of her face to any and all cyberneurons within range, but this is the Arizona Protectorate, and the Neo-Calvinists can tell with one ping that I’ve been changed. They put that program in me, you know, after the Neo-Calvinist judge decided I’d raped her. I can’t remember being with Lori anymore. I mean being with her. Whenever I try, or whenever I think of anything James, please hear me, I’m suddenly gone, and after the blackout I’ve lost time–a hiccup of seconds if I’ve tried to say a dirty word; whole minutes if I stare at a woman’s please! and start to fantasize.
I’m afraid of what happens to me in those lost moments.
The judge said I’ll need to let it go. When they put that program in you, it’s for life.
Posted on: November 13th, 2011 Shooting Stars
by Chris Stamp
Jeb and me, we cursed the world, goddamn it to hell! Atop two lonely, rusted trailers, full of ire and spite and iron will, we’d shoot our guns with scorn and zeal into the night.
Well that night was a night for shooting stars: Perseids or some such, I had heard. We fired into the void, Jack Daniels between our feet, hollered war cries as we brought each one down. Concussion and fire, far out in the desert. Trailers bucking like surfboards as they hit the ground. I swear, we ruled it all, and God had no complaint.
Now, I was thick with liquor but I could ever hold my wits; Jeb was always the one to lose them first. He shot one out of the sky from right above our heads–never can forget its eerie, mocking scream. A glare of bright light took my senses, threw me down, life crashed around me. I think I even seen a hasty devil’s smile.
But I spat out grit and grinned, though my hair was singed and my face was burned. Bottle jutted from the sand, not a precious drop spilled. Gun was hot to the touch but I wasn’t letting go. I grabbed the Jack by the neck and laughed, picked me up, clawed my way back up on top again.
There I saw it: Jeb’s trailer, smashed to Hell in a shining pool of glass. And Jeb himself: two upturned, smoking boots, cleated soles fending off an ebon, outraged sky.
I tipped my head back and I yelled my pain. Hollow echoes swirled and taunted, and the bastard moon glared its contempt. I stared back a moment, and had a thought. I took it in my sights and shot. A crater blossomed, and that pale rock span round once. Fired another, its fat face span faster and my head span faster still. Third shot stopped it, made a thumb hole, and I owned it; there it hung. Made to pitch it ‘cross the desert, cities: ninepins in my mind’s eye. Sweet rage in my veins made my soul sing.
Well my boot heel slipped off the edge, and I sat down, hard. Held the bottle up high, looked at the sky, an eye for Mars. Drew a bead and squeezed the trigger, but I couldn’t keep it steady and the shot went wild. Second did it: burst in red sparks, and the scorched air tasted good and bitter between my coughs.
A ping of cooling glass above the ringing in my ears–I looked down at Jeb, gone too soon, and shook my head. But no angel ever loved him, blight and ruin doted on him. Better this fate than a razor ‘gainst his wrist.
Raised my eyes to black hills crouched there, smug as judges, shade on darkness. They thought I’d spare them, but I showed them; knocked the tops off, broken teeth left; flint-edged hail rattled down around my ears.
Just three bullets more, less Jack than I liked, so I turned myself around and I eased myself back, faced the east, sipped my whisky, smoked cigars, held my gun ready. Waited for the damned sun to rise.
Posted on: October 30th, 2011 The Cretins
by Ben Godby
The building had used to be city hall; but its vitals had been moved on to elsewhere, and now that place had been converted, presumably, to breed Cretins.
No one could say precisely what the Cretins were, despite everyone having given them a name. They were prone to night-prowling, and it was always noticed only in the morning.
“In the washtub,” mutters the best evidence, “under the sink.”
It has been said that they are friends of raccoons, settling on their haunches in alleys to see what the rodents bring back – not out of real interest, but friendly commiseration. Conversely, their own stalking, which was a lurking, required no movement at all. Theoretically, that un-movement was the Archimedean point of the spectroscopic gaze of Cretinism – which, kundalini-like, first attacked the material, then the emotional, and then the body itself.
A poet, who had spied a fragment re: the Cretins in a discontinued home-and-gardening journal with charred pages he had found in a trunk in his recently deceased grandmother’s attic, described it thusly:
“You awake to find everything gone. The furniture; the affects; the foods. Walls, sheets, and even the humility of floors: all victimized. It seems, at first, rather crass, and you feel guilty to feel anything at all.
“Then, you awake to emptiness. It has no hardness, and yet is gnawing. It is easy to explain but very difficult to understand. This, it is said, is the clue.
“Finally, you awake – and are armless. Or else one leg is amputated, or you find an organ has been donated unwittingly. You leak, you sore, you stare into the own red marrow of yourself; but it is painful, at the last, only because the Cretins do not respond to allegations.
“Oh, and, for the record: if you have lost your mind, you are not a victim of the Cretins.”
But the poet, in this case as in every one, is the exception. Further expert testimony:
1. “I have never seen a Cretin, and I never will.”
2. “It is natural. Horror is natural.”
3. (Offstage, laughter.) “You call that a Cretin?”
There is X. X is a Cretin, though a Cretin is not necessarily X. At present X stands on the edge of the water, for the building that was once city hall strides upon a breath of river. The hall and the river caress each other, and pool their love in the wavering ripples of reflected light – architecture in flow – that collect in the warm dark recesses between them, which are X (though not necessarily, in this sense, [a] Cretin[s]).
“How I am got here, I do not know,” says X with a professorial index finger extended. “How I am like this, I know not. But I will say this: there are myriad appetites for Cretins, and objects to satisfy them all.”
The city hall is moved further from its birthplace and the thing spawning there, leaving newly voided architectural bowels in its wake as the guts are moved with earnest reconsideration. Whether new Cretin-factories will fill these places, too, is up for review by a special committee convened by the city council.
Elsewhere, in rows, houses and buildings do not collapse. Meanwhile, a figure stands upon the verge of a river, wreathed in the cut-out of itself against the angular windows and the iridescent glow off the water that will shine always until morning.
By Scott Akalis
It was 3:00pm when mother and daughter soared past the first exhibit. The nameplate read “Michael Kustich.”
“What is a Michael?” asked the young fly.
“He looks like an intern,” said her mother.
“Look at the little intern! He’s so cute!”
The flies moved on to the next human, a much larger man labeled “Dennis Bilbee.”
“Is that cubicle big enough for him?” asked the young fly. “I wish he had more space to run free.”
“By the looks of him,” said her mother, “he doesn’t much like running.”
In the third exhibit, a female, “Jenny Crebrink,” could be seen bouncing her knees up and down and rattling her fingers on a can and mug-covered desktop.
“I like this one,” said the young fly. “She’s so active.”
The fourth cubicle was empty, so they landed on a glass wall in the corner. “As you can see,” said the mother fly, “this species gets a larger enclosure.”
“I want to see his face, but he won’t turn around,” said the young fly, who tried buzzing the glass to get his attention.
“Don’t buzz the glass, honey,” said her mother. “They don’t like it when you do that.”
The flies launched themselves from the glass to the ceiling’s paneled lighting. “Have you had enough?” asked the mother fly.
“Just one more,” said her daughter.
They flew to the last cubicle, where a woman named “Sheryl Gibbons” was clicking between spreadsheets and Facebook. “Why does she keep going back and forth like that?” asked the young fly. “It’s like she’s in a trance or something.”
“That’s a sign of stress,” explained her mother.
At 3:25pm, the pair of flies departed. Although they had spent a considerable portion of their lifespan in the office, it felt like nothing.
Posted on: October 2nd, 2011 Zombie Funeral
By Daniel Eness
But can we so easily forget the Rhonda who also spent the past month in that greasy mid-shin apron stalking, stalking, ever stalking?
“Life is trouble,” she used to say nearly every day from behind the griddle at the Maid-Rite. She was a working-class philosopher, a woman with a machine-gun brain and a mouth that squeezed the trigger, cutting down real customers and imagined exes on an indiscriminate daily spree.
After she stood up, her life was trouble on two crooked feet, her thousand-pound soul was trouble, her wheezing afterthoughts were trouble, her teeth – her teeth were trouble. Even then, there was something about her: the way she clung to that fry cage like it was a doll, the way she dragged her left foot behind her, as if some important part of her struggled to restrain her new nature, struggled to keep something back in a forgotten, invisible, unknowable land: our own.
Today we mourn and rejoice.
Let us not turn too quickly from the brutal metaphor we can finally bury today. Indeed, a great weight has finally lifted from Rhonda Rust’s shoulders: her own head.
by Lydia S Gray
I go down to the river, to that spot where it bends around the big rock and the current undercuts the bank. I cast my net into the deepest part and catch two small fish and a baby. I eat the fish straight away, but I save the baby for later. It stares at me as I tie it in the bag, and I carry it back over my shoulder so I don’t have to look at it.
Back at the camp I put it in the pen. It kicks its fat legs and screams, so I put my hands over my ears and try not to listen. I hate the noise they make.
“Keep it as a pet,” someone said, but they always say that. They want everything as a pet, even a dog. I don’t know why they’d want that. Just one more mouth to feed, and a useless one too.
It screams all evening. I hoped that we’d eat it that night, but someone caught a cat and it’s already gone into the pot. It smells good, but I’d rather have the baby.
*
I can’t sleep. Someone’s snoring and the baby keeps on screaming. I hope someone will go out and knock it on the head, but no one does and I don’t want to do it myself.
After a while I fall into a doze, but even there the baby carries on. Only it isn’t that baby any more, it’s the other one. The one that came out of me after I got huge. I got so big I thought that they would eat me, I seemed so full of food. But the river called it and the baby came out in a rush of water. I saw its face as it screamed and swam away. I got a cat in exchange, an old one.
The fat moon stares at me through the holes in the roof. The baby’s still making its noise. I’m not going to put up with it.
“Make it shut up,” I say, kicking someone, but they just turn over and go back to snoring. I’ll have to do it myself.
I stamp out of the hut, banging the door behind me. I can smell the baby as I get close. It’s shit in the pen. Someone will have to clean that up, I’m not going to do it.
It waves its arms at me, making fists with its hands like it wants to hit me. Maybe its brave. It looks like the baby in the dream, but they all look the same really. They all sound the same.
I pick it up, slinging it over my shoulder and holding it by its fat hands. I run back to the river, jogging quickly before someone sees me.
At the rock I crouch down and dangle the baby over the water. “Give me a fish instead,” I say, but I’d take anything, a puppy or a kitten. Maybe just a different baby. I let it go and it falls with a little plop, vanishing into the dark water. It doesn’t scream when it goes in. Perhaps I should have waited, maybe it was done with the noise.
I wait a little while for it to go, and then I reach down and plunge my arms in. I should have brought the net if I wanted something in exchange, but I forgot. The water surrounds me, cold but not dark, silent and sparkling with light. I wonder if this is what the baby saw. I wonder where they go.
There’s something between my hands, large and furry. I pull out a dog, a big one. It sets up a whimper as I sling it over my shoulder. Maybe it will eat the baby shit. Dogs sometimes do that.
*
For a while I crouch by the pen and it whimpers at me, everything makes noise. I wish it was quiet. I don’t want to go back to sleep, someone will be snoring again, and the moon is so big, it throws strange shadows. I walk back to the river, to the spot where it bends around the rock and the water runs deep.
I plunge my hands in, and then my arms, my head. I let myself go, sliding into the water. I kick my feet. They are a fish’s tail, a baby’s legs. The lights sparkle around me.